Pirate Bay's Anonymity Service Enters Beta Testing 137
schliz writes "Developers of The Pirate Bay have launched their new Virtual Private Network (VPN) service to some 180,000 pre-registered beta testers. An e-mail to beta testers read. 'IPREDator does not store any personal details about its clients. IPREDator does not store any traffic habits you might have. IPREDator is the key to a free internet in the renaissance of censorship!' The new service was launched to protect file sharers in response to the Swedish Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) that went into effect in April."
Re:Meh - black servers have been around for years. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Does not store any personal details about clien (Score:1, Interesting)
After that, as long as it doesn't record the IP addresses you're visiting, it's effectively anonymous and thus valid.
Yes, Pirate Bay could secretly store that information, but I somehow doubt they would.
Re:Meh - black servers have been around for years. (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually wrote my own at one point that tunneled itself steganographically using decent crypto disguised inside webcam sessions. Unfortunately, the throughput was abyssal, and of course--it was pretty difficult to get 'real' network behavior.
I wouldn't say the point of a darknet is to hide a node's activity from one another--so much as it is to conceal their presence from anything not in the darknet. Tor helps hide a nodes activity from another node (sort of), but isn't a darknet. Freenet--you can search for, but generally speaking you can't find other nodes in freenet trivially. I'd call it a greynet.
What's wrong with freenet?
It works beautifully for its intended purpose, even if there's a sad amount of...malcontent littered throughout it. Despite the nastyness that you store on your own hard drive (which you couldn't read anyway unless you want searching for it), it's not like you or anyone else could ever prove it was on your system--if they could, the very trial itself would necessitate proving a means to crack commonly used cryptographic protocols--keeping that secret (if it's possible) would be worth more to anyone than convicting you ever would be.
Amusing: Captcha = "crimes"
Re:Free? (Score:4, Interesting)
gonna have to keep some kind of records of those payments; therefore it's not fully anonymous.
Yes, the record that have to keep would amount to this: "x user paid his monthly fee". There is no need to retain any other information.
Re:Does not store any personal details about clien (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, because no one would think that the soon to be new CEO, who happens to be good friends with the RIAA [cnet.com], would ever do such a thing as log traffic or identifiable information. Right?
Re:Meh - black servers have been around for years. (Score:1, Interesting)
The evidence you cite would not prove intent, and therefore fail to obtain a conviction. That is because requests made through the FN network make copies all along the request path. Making requests actually increase the likelihood that material will be found on the network, and will definitely copy the material to the node that returns the material to you. Sure, that node that served you will have the material. But you put it there, unless you can prove otherwise.
Even if you could isolate the node from the network and force it to fulfill requests, you would not know if that material was put there by the request of another node. You would have to know the history of the network to prove possession with intent to distribute. That would require an ability to watch the network transparently, a power probably only the NSA possesses. It is something outside the scope of law enforcement.